Moment 38 - Happiness Is A Choice: The Controversial Truth: Mo Gawdat

00:03you're inferring something which i think will annoy a lot of people and that is that happiness is a choice oh totally and that you you you can choose to be happy totally and that if you're unhappy and really for many circumstances in our life day to day and work and love and relationships personal responsibility is the is the answer and entirely on you and a lack thereof is the cause absolutely you know what you just did you've just lost us 88 percent of the audience i know do you know why i know because i did a tweet one day about this and what my tweet was um there's like a i guess a mental model but there's a reframing that can i think has brought me happiness which is when something happens to me i i used to like many people say x thing that happened has pissed me off yeah and just by changing that sentence to i've pissed myself off because of x thing absolutely and i tweeted that and i was like try it just like reframe it and take personal responsibility for how you're feeling and in the comment section everyone was like nope yeah people don't like the idea that they have control over their emotional responses so when i when i wrote so when i wrote when i write books in general i write them i write them like software so

01:15i issue a beta version okay and i get 270 people i don't know why 270 but it's fascinating yeah i I get 270 people to read it on Google Docs. So I give them editor privileges so I can actually edit the text, right? And then something fascinating happens. They edit the text and then others edit what they edited, okay? And there is a conversation happening and basically it takes the book to its best possible version if you want. In Soul for Happy, I had a sentence on page 11 that basically said exactly what you said.

01:49Happiness is a choice, okay? And at that page, I lost 8% of the readers. Okay. And, you know, I looked into the information that they gave me about themselves, the early readers, and most of the 8% that left were already in depression. Okay. And to tell someone it's your responsibility to get yourself out of this horrible place that you're in is quite disturbing because we like the idea of saying, no, no, hold on. No, it's not me. Life is treating me really badly.

02:20that's why I'm not happy. Okay. I can't do anything about it. Life took my son. You know, life took my son. I have the right to be unhappy. Yes, life took your son. That's true. And you have the right to be unhappy, but you're never going to get out of unhappiness if you wait for life to bring him back or you wait for life to correct its action. Okay. The only way you can come out of unhappiness is if you choose and say, okay, it's going to be a long journey. It's going to take a lot of time. Okay. And I'm going to try and try and try, but I'll get there. And neuroplasticity proves that. Neuroplasticity basically tells you that if you just run a happiness kind of activity once a day, every day, your brain will be better at it. And I mean, please don't get me wrong, but what do most of us do every day? We watch negative news, we swipe on toxic positivity, and we're just drowning ourselves in negativity.

03:14And then what happens? What happens is we become really good at being negative. We become really good at finding what's wrong with life. We become very good at getting pissed off with the prime minister, right? Because it's an activity we do on daily basis. So your brain goes like, this must be important for her or him. Okay, I'm just gonna make sure I have the neurons aligned around that. And so we're basically configuring our brains to be unhappy.

03:37I have not watched a horror movie for 15 years. Really? Yeah. You know what that means? I have not had a nightmare for 15 years. Not a single one. Okay. I have not watched a violent movie unless really badly recommended to me because it has a good message in it. And I watch Michael McIntyre every night before I sleep. I love Michael McIntyre. Who's going to get me to say hi to Michael McIntyre? But think about that practice. my brain before I go to sleep is laughing it's laughing that's a choice that's a choice and and that is the kind of neuroplasticity that we need to shift you know if you if you go to the gym and lift weights every day you're going to look like a triangle if you squat every day you're going to look like a pair okay the same is happening inside your brain you just don't see it if you're constantly watching you know news media right you're literally building your muscles that are concerned and are you know critical and are worried about the world when in reality most of the time you can't do anything about it like okay so i'll give you a very strange example when i was locked down first lockdown i was in london second lockdown i was in canada okay as the lockdown was approaching i stopped watching news after april 2020 zero news okay

05:04and by the time i was in montreal someone texted me and said hey by the way did you know we're going to code red tomorrow i said yeah what's code red she said all restaurants are closed you wear a mask everywhere i said good that's it that's all the news i needed to know really okay people would go like, no, how come you need to know the numbers and the statistics and the death rate? No, I don't. Okay. Someone else is doing this. And by the way, if I know it and I don't like it, and I don't believe in what they're doing, I'm going to be locked down anyway.

05:36So can I waste my time or actually utilize my time in building a podcast that becomes one of the top half percent of all podcasts globally? Isn't that a better use of my life than just watching the news and, you know, creating that illusion for myself that I can actually influence anything when in reality. So, you know, I normally advise people and say, look, if you've been following a certain topic for the last two months and have not been able to influence the decision on that topic for the last two months, you're useless. So stop watching that topic. Okay. And start choosing topics that you can champion. Okay. One or two, because you're human. You're not, you know, you're not Superman. Find one or two real, you know, purposes that you actually care about and try to learn enough about them, enough depth about them to influence them. That's the way to make the world better. That's the way to make your life better. And yeah, climate change is really something very important, but it's not on my agenda. I don't work on climate change.

06:38I work on happiness. That's my part of life. Okay. Someone else I trust will be working on climate change which i believe is as important if not more important but it's not mine i don't need to watch everything about it okay and concern myself about it all the time i need to be updated i need to do my part by by really changing my habits as a human but that's it that's as far as i go there's something in there which is clearly a theme and i think three topics we've touched on the passing of your son you know you talked there about covid um and other elements which is this theme of like radical acceptance oh absolutely like instant radical acceptance oh absolutely i mean this is what i call the jedi master level of happiness so there are three levels of happiness right uh the the you know if you um if you really think about it i call it the happiness flow chart events are gonna piss you off it's just the truth if you can manage to acknowledge your emotion and say oh my god i feel so am i angry is this anger i mean is this is this what i'm feeling and then And then you take that feeling and you say to yourself, okay, interesting.

07:46I am angry. I need to do something about it. I will give you three steps. Okay. The beginner's level is ask yourself if what you're thinking is true. Your partner said something hurtful on Friday. Your thought is he or she doesn't love me anymore. Okay. Ask yourself if that thought is true. If it isn't, drop it. There is no point to be unhappy. if it is then let's go to the black belt level of unhappiness which is can i do think something about it that's the second question is it true is question one can i do something about it is question two right and honestly by the way it doesn't take more than two seconds to feel the emotion ask yourself if it's true and then go to say to to uh to can i do something about it and if yes then do it what are you waiting for text him or text her and say baby can we please talk over dinner what you said on Friday hurt me okay instead of just banging your head against the table hoping that they will find out and come and say oh I'm so sorry you know I I had I was teaching this story really hurts me I I was teaching you know when before lockdown I I taught a lot of people in workshops and seminars more than 20,000 people one one day one of them comes to me in the

08:58first break and says what are you talking about what do you mean happiness is a choice you have no idea what happened to me okay and i said okay and she said when i was 17 she was 74 at the time can you believe that 57 years of holding on to one thought hitting her head against the wall right and i hugged her i hugged her i cried and i said did it work did all of that work or was the better thought okay it was horrible but can i do something about it okay and that's question number two that's black belt sometimes however there's nothing you can do about it whatever she experienced could be irreversible what i have experienced the loss of ali is irreversible there's nothing you can do about it okay and i'm not asking everyone to get there quickly but the jedi master level of happiness just to say okay it happened and i have no choice to change it there is nothing i can do to fix it so can i accept it but not surrender and lie down and you know and and die accept it and then start to do something to make my my life better despite its presence or maybe because of its presence okay can i accept that ali died and start to spread his message so that my life and the life of others become better?

10:21Can I accept that I'm locked down and start my podcast so that I can use the time where I'm not traveling? Can I do that? I call that committed acceptance, okay? And it's very simple. If you commit and accept, if you accept things you can't change and commit to make your life better despite of or because of their presence, nothing can beat you. Nothing can beat you. And yeah, is it horrible that I actually managed to move on and not hit my head against the wall for 27 years?

10:53Does that say I don't love Ali? What are you talking about? I adore Ali. I cry about missing him still today, right? It's not that, there is nothing to prove in that. what what i can prove is i love him so much that i actually dedicate my life to spreading his message that's so much better than sitting there and saying ah life hit me i don't like life right look that's a six-year-old attitude honestly okay adults will say okay and especially business people i mean your audiences huh the market changes all the time do you sit down and go like I lost another deal or do you just get up and say why did we lose this deal what can we do about it right and if if there is something wrong with the product can we change the product right well you talk to there about business in particular rings very very true because in business and you've been you know very successful entrepreneur yourself and worked with teams you'll get people who are high in defaulting to logic in moments of chaos and also default to personal responsibility and those that don't yeah and the outcomes of both groups are quite predictable very different and actually this this approach of is it true uh can i do something about it can i accept it and

12:13and commit i learned that in business okay so i've spent most of my my career i was managing managers and what do managers do they open your door and they sit down and complain okay and after a while it becomes too much so my attitude was very straightforward i would give them 10 minutes to vent, then 10 minutes to ask them, is this true? Okay. Is there anything you're missing? Is the legal team also nice? Not just making your life miserable, right? Have you seen evidence that they've helped you before? So, you know, is it true? And then I go like, so now, great, last 10 minutes of the meeting, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to be able to improve it, fix it, or are we going to accept it and do something despite its presence? And it's a very simple business approach. Now, most of us do that in business, but when it comes to our personal life, we don't do that. And interestingly, most of us, by the way, who do that in business are very successful in business. And most of us who do that in life are very successful in life.

13:14It's not just happy. It makes us successful because it doesn't waste our cycles on things that are not necessary. So if you can do it at work, do it at home, do it in your life, do it in your relationships. It's really a very straightforward flowchart.